Cet article, qui porte sur la RDA, analyse d’une part l’impact des conditions sociales et des relations de genre sur les décisions des femmes en matière de famille, éducation et emploi, d’autre part l’interaction dynamique entre ces décisions et les politiques du parti au pouvoir (SED). En 1970, les femmes sont au centre des nombreux dilemmes économiques qu’affronte ce dernier. Entrées massivement sur le marché du travail dans les années 1960, les femmes ont fait moins d’enfants et pris des temps (...) partiels. Dans une RDA en manque de bras, ces comportements ont inquiété le SED et l’ont conduit à une révision majeure de la politique sociale et économique dans un sens favorable aux mères. Mais plutôt que de résoudre les problèmes économiques et démographiques, ces politiques maternalistes ont accéléré la privatisation et l’individualisation des subjectivités, spécialement chez les femmes éduquées, de plus en plus nombreuses. (shrink)

Resumen Jürgen Fuchs (1950-99) fue uno de los escritores nacidos en la RDA, cuyas biografías no solo fueron moldeadas por el régimen del SED, sino también deformadas con eficacia. Asimismo, fue uno de los pocos que trató expresiva y abruptamente los tabúes y mecanismos de un Estado gobernado de manera totalitaria. La obra literaria de Fuchs es un testimonio de época, un desafío al régimen comunista y a su legado contenido en los archivos de la Stasi. Por un lado, su (...) escritura, saturada de experiencia y teñida de autobiografía, lleva al lector a un impactante viaje a los tiempos de la segunda dictadura alemana y le permite echar un vistazo, entre bastidores, a la sociedad (post)socialista; por otro lado, se nos revela que Jürgen Fuchs, en su calidad de intelectual, se sintió obligado a intervenir allí donde había que prevenir la violencia, la mentira y el olvido. Este artículo examina el desarrollo literario de este autor, independiente en muchos aspectos, y examina las razones que le motivaron a romper el silencio y tender la mano hacia la verdad y la justicia e incluso, de ser necesario, a provocar un debate abierto. Abstract Jürgen Fuchs (1950-1999) was one of those GDR-born writers, whose biographies were not only shaped by the SED regime, but which also successfully deformed it. He was one of the few individuals who eloquently and unwaveringly exposed the taboos and mechanism of the totalitarian state. Fuchs’s literary oeuvre is a testimony of his times as well as a confrontation with the communist regime and its legacy in the form of the Stasi records. Coloured autobiographically and saturated with his own life experience, his writing takes the reader on a shocking journey into the time of the second German dictatorship, allowing them a look behind the scenes of the (post) socialist society. At the same time it brings about a realisation that as an intellectual Fuchs felt obliged to interfere whenever it was necessary to prevent violence, lies and forgetting about the past. This article traces the literary development of Fuchs as an independent writer and examines his motivation not to remain silent, to strive for truth and justice, and to provoke debate, whenever necessary. (shrink)

Medical ethics has been developing in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) since the 1970's on the basis of the traditional ethics of physicians and the socio-economic fundamentals of our socialist state. Medical care provided in the framework of Marxist-Leninist medical ethics is based on rationality and humanity. Keywords: Medical ethics, socialist values, health promotion, care of the dying, euthanasia, Marxism-Leninism, German Democratic Republic, bioethics CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?

Ca. 40 published papers from a summer institute in the German Democratic Republic in 1988.

Following the February Revolution in 1848, working-class women as well as men attempted to hold the government to its promise of the right to work, through street demonstrations, individual and collective demands for work, and participation in the national workshops that had been established in an attempt to address the problem of unemployment in the capital. In the process, these activists articulated what scholars have labelled as a democratic socialist vision of republicanism. In June of 1848, women participated in (...) the insurrection that sought to defend the vision of a social republic. While the republicanism of working-class men and bourgeois women such as George Sand has been examined, studies of working-class women in the first half of the nineteenth century have to this point focused on the romantic socialist influences that shaped their activities, in particular the Saint-Simonian movement. Drawing primarily on individual letters, police interrogations and newspaper reports, a vision of republicanism emerges that includes the ability for women to sustain their families through waged as well as household labour. This concept of republican virtue based itself not in suffrage but in women's capacity to act as both producers and consumers under just and equitable conditions. (shrink)

Brecht's relationship to Marxism is extremely important and highly complex. From the 1920s until his death in 1956, Brecht identified himself as a Marxist; when he returned to Germany after World War II, he chose the German Democratic Republic (GDR), where his actress wife Helene Weigel and he formed their own theater troupe, the famed Berliner Ensemble, and were eventually given a state theater to run. Yet Brecht's relationship to orthodox Marxist officials and doctrine was often conflictual, and (...) his own work and life were highly idiosyncratic. Of a strongly anti-bourgeois disposition from his youth, the young Brecht was also initially repelled by Bolshevism. He experienced the German revolution of 1918 with some ambivalence and dedicated himself to literary and not political activity during the turbulent early years of the Weimar republic. He recorded in his Diaries, for example, a negative response to a talk he heard on 1920 on the Soviet Union in which he was repelled by the concept of socialist order he heard discussed. He indicated a negative impression of Bolshevism and conclude his entry by noting that he rather have a new car than socialism! (shrink)

Recommandations have been formulated in 1985 with reference to socialist morality and law and as a result of interdisciplinary discussion by the IAME (Interdisciplinary Working Party on Medical Ethics at the GDR Academy of Postgraduate Medical Education) for clinical application of in vitro fertilization and for the use of human oocytes and early embryonic stages.

Violence seems to be the central preoccupation in the work of Heiner Müller: from the early plays on the painful birth of a new socialist state, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), built on the ruins of one and overshadowed by the rise of another totalitarian system, to the political parables and allegories borrowed from Greek and Shakespearean tragedy; from his adaptations of some of the bloodiest episodes of the French, Russian, and German revolutions to the late dramatic (...) experiments bent on shattering the theatrical form itself. The concern with violence is indeed so pervasive as to appear obsessive. Violence is.. (shrink)

Les transformations profondes que vivent les sociétés socialistes en Europe centrale et orientale après 1945 seraient-elles sans effet sur les masculinités? L’article souhaite nuancer cette idée reçue en analysant les débats sur la paternité en Allemagne de l’Est. Dans l’immédiat après-guerre, des images de pères « socialistes » présents auprès de leurs enfants apparaissent dans les médias et les réflexions portant sur une nouvelle conception de la paternité socialiste et égalitaire se multiplient à partir des années 1960. Des débats s’articulent, (...) dans un premier temps, autour d’une critique formulée à l’égard de la société et du régime socialistes qui n’aurait eu que peu d’influence sur l’évolution des masculinités pendant les deux premières décennies du « socialisme réel ». Dans un deuxième temps, les années 1970 et 1980 voient fleurir des propositions concrètes de transformation de la paternité pour tendre vers une paternité socialiste. Si la plupart ont échoué, elles témoignent d’une volonté de modifier les rapports de genre d’une société en devenir, opposée à l’Ouest. (shrink)

The long Nineteenth Century spans a host of important philosophical movements: romanticism, idealism, socialism, Nietzscheanism, and phenomenology, to mention a few. Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Marx are well-known names from this period. This, however, was also a transformative period for women philosophers in German-speaking countries and contexts. Their works are less well-known, yet offer stimulating and path-breaking contributions to nineteenth-century thought. In this period, women philosophers explored a wide range of philosophical topics and styles. Throughout the movements of (...) romanticism, idealism, socialism, and phenomenology, women philosophers helped shape philosophy's agenda and provided unique approaches to existential, political, aesthetic, and epistemological questions. While during the Nineteenth Century women continued to be (largely) excluded from formal education and positions, they developed ways of philosophizing that was accessible, intuitive, and activist in spirit. The present volume makes available to English-language readers--often for the first time--the works of nine significant women philosophers, with the hope of stimulating further interest in and scholarship on their works. The Editors' introductions offer a comprehensive introduction to the contributions of women philosophers in the period, but also to individual figures and movements. The translations are furnished with explanatory footnotes and are designed to be accessible to students as well as scholars. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Meanings and Function of Anti-System Ideology in the Weimar RepublicBen LiebermanThere are few, if any, ideological terms in the extensive historiography of the Weimar Republic so omnipresent and yet at the same time so obscure as the word “system.” Historical accounts of the Weimar Republic are strewn with references to the “system.” In recent works on the Weimar Republic Hagen Schulze points to the opposition of bourgeois (bürgerliche) (...) parties to the “Weimar ‘system,’ “ Detlev Peukert notes “hatred of ‘the system,’ the political and social order of the Republic”; Knut Borchardt observes the loss of faith in the capacity of “the system” to satisfy expectations; and Hans Mommsen refers to the “political system,” the “party system” and the “parliamentary system.” 1Historians, whatever their other differences, agree that mounting opposition to the System weakened the Weimar Republic, but the usefulness of this observation requires analysis of the meaning or meanings of the System. What, then, was the Weimar System? Surprisingly, many accounts of the Weimar Republic do not even attempt to provide a definition of the System, and the term receives only cursory treatment in several specialized works on ideology of the Weimar era. 2 Anti-System politics does receive attention, but Thomas [End Page 355] Childers’s insightful and pioneering essay on “anti-system politics” concentrates on mobilization against the System rather than on the problem of defining it. 3The best existing analysis of the System in Kurt Sontheimer’s valuable study of anti-democratic thought in the Weimar Republic suggests that historians cannot take the meaning of the term as a given. Sontheimer establishes that the System formed part of the array of anti-democratic thought of the Weimar Republic, but he also notes that the term’s meaning cannot easily be pinned down. The System conveyed a variety of political and economic meanings and ultimately formed a “nationalist counter myth.” 4During the Weimar Republic, attacks against the System emanated from a wide range of sources, most notably from a variety of nationalists as well as from Communists. Nationalists of many leanings detested the System. The DNVP (German National People’s Party), the largest political party of the right for most of the Weimar Republic, hated the System. So, too, did conservative revolutionaries and völkisch (ethnic or racist nationalist) groups including nationalist associations and the National Socialists. At the other end of the political spectrum, attacks against the System also surfaced in the pronouncements of the KPD (German Communist Party). 5No single ideological line of attack doomed the Weimar Republic, but use by an extraordinarily broad range of political groups lent tremendous force to anti-System discourse. Adopted by foes who sometimes agreed on little else, the System was the targets of repeated attacks spread across the German political spectrum and called into question Weimar legitimacy. Analyzing this broad pattern of use raises several tasks. As a prelude to investigating anti-System terminology, it is necessary to map out the patterns of use of the System during the Weimar Republic. The very ability of rival groups to adopt anti-System suggests that the System incorporated varied meanings.Beyond investigating the meaning or meanings of the System, an analysis of anti-System terminology should also explore the appeal and influence of anti-System terminology. Why did such a broad range of groups adopt anti-System discourse, and how did acceptance of anti-System terminology help to discredit the Weimar Republic and designate alternatives for Germany’s future? [End Page 356]Describing Weimar’s perceived failings, anti-System terminology simultaneously provided a partial guide to a presumably-better Germany without the System. The System came to envelop many institutions of German public life, but attention should also be paid to spaces left unoccupied by the System. What, if any, institutions or structures of public life were left untainted by the broad wave of attacks against the System? If the hated System could be swept away, what would be left in its place? It is noteworthy that the many enemies of the System generally desired a strong state.Exploring the effects of broad attacks against the System, analysis of the System should also... (shrink)

This book is an important contribution to the theory of democracy and socialism. The underlying question it poses is: how, if at all, can one have both socialism and democracy? In posing an answer to this question, Professor Cunningham addresses the following topics: the definition of democracy and whether socialism is necessary to its progress: the socialist retrieval of liberal democracy associated with the work of C. B. Macpherson: the political consciousness that Gramsci placed at the center of socialist politics: (...) and attempts by those in women's and national liberation movements to go beyond 'class reductionism' in socialist theory and practice. Unlike other works on this topic, the book devotes much attention to defining key terms and drawing politically relevant conclusions. It will therefore be fully accessible to undergraduates as well as graduates and teachers of philosophy and political science. (shrink)

The authors examine the “second shift” in the former socialist Yugoslavia through the analysis of 1989-90 data from a random sample of 7,790 adults in the paid labor force. Despite working outside the home, women are primarily responsible for housework. Neither education, occupation, urbanization, nor participation in the informal economy has a significant effect in reducing this; only the presence of an older female in the household measurably reduces an employed woman's participation in the second shift. Not only are men's (...) attitudes important for women's performance of the second shift but also men's ability to act in terms of this value displays the significance of a gendered social structure in socialist societies. (shrink)

The German Democratic Republic was in existence for 41 years. A single generation spent its whole professional life there – namely those born in the early 1930s who carried this state’s hopes. With Karl Mannheim’s notion of generations as a unit in the sociology of knowledge in mind, this article describes this generation’s typical experiences from the point of view of a particularly telling group: economists at the Humboldt University of Berlin. I present their socialization in Nazi Germany, (...) their formative years in the aftermath of the Second World War that led to their choice of a politically driven profession, their studies during the first years of the GDR, when Stalinism was still the dominating dogma, and their commitment to a state career when writing their dissertations and habilitations. Ready to shoulder Honecker’s regime, their daily lives as professors were characterized by continuing attempts to reform teaching and research. In 1989 the ultimate reform transpired, and it encompassed the end of the state as well as of their professional careers. This narrative historicizes, on an experiential level, a tension often noted in GDR research, that between the ideological and productive functions of knowledge in socialism, that is, between loyalty and relevance. (shrink)

The Long Nineteenth Century--from Romanticism, to socialism, and phenomenology--was a prosperous time for women philosophers. This Handbook, the first of its kind, is dedicated to their works. It explores women's pathbreaking contributions to philosophy: the ways in which they shaped and transformed philosophical movements, the new concepts they established and schools they helped form, and the philosophical problems they uncovered and sought to resolve. Through thirty-one chapters, the Handbook furnishes novel interpretations of the contributions of women philosophers in the (...) class='Hi'>German tradition, while also deepening and revising our understanding of nineteenth-century philosophy. By investigating the nineteenth century through the works of women philosophers, the Handbook detects understudied or unknown connections between figures, movements, and positions in European thought. It offers a richer and more complex picture of one of the most exciting periods in the history of philosophy, and raises crucial systematic questions concerning the philosophical canon and canon-making. Through its newly-commissioned contributions, the Handbook honors the work of trailblazing women philosophers. (shrink)

The paper discusses the practice of genetic counseling and elective abortion in the German Democratic Republic. Keywords: elective abortion, embryo transfer, in vitro fertilization, protection of human life, reproductive ethics, German Democratic Republic, bioethics CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?

This anthology brings together new essays by leading figures in contemporary philosophy, scholars whose work is well known not only to the entire community of academic philosophy, but to many in the associated fields of sociology, women's studies, literary theory, and political science. Defining for the first time the boundaries and accomplishments of a body of work deeply critical of both the philosophical and the social dimensions of domination, the collection draws on diverse traditions and social movements. These include feminism, (...) critical theory, Marxism, deconstruction, democratic socialism, theories of race and ethnicity, deep ecology, and politicized spirituality. The contributors use these resources to comprehend and indict the present social order and to help us imagine a more just, liberating, and fulfilling society. In his lucid Introduction, Roger S. Gottlieb describes the formative contexts, achievements, and dilemmas of radical philosophy. Essays in Part I, Tradition, challenge the pretensions of philosophy in epistemology, ethics, and the theory of human nature. These articles unveil the social oppression hidden behind self-proclaimed attempts at Grand and Unbiased Philosophical Reason. In Part II, Counter-Tradition, the contributors engage with today's dominant critical perspectives and show how multi-faceted, rich, and sometimes confusing these perspectives are. Their topics include issues of exploitation, democracy, and justice; the current status of Marxism; the impact of deep ecology on radical theory; and some dilemmas faced by cultural feminism. Part III, Politics, addresses questions about contemporary North American political and cultural life. The essaysexamine relations among varying types of oppression, the experience of community and communities, the possibilities of fundamental political change, and the representation of difference in popular culture. (shrink)

Romano Guardini was one of the most important intellectuals of German Catholicism in the twentieth century. He influenced nearly an entire generation of German Catholic theologians and was the leading figure of the German Catholic youth movement as it grew exponentially in the 1920s. Yet there are many open questions about his early intellectual development and his academic contribution to religious, cultural, social and political questions in the Weimar Republic and in National Socialist Germany. This article draws (...) upon Guardini’s publications, the secondary literature on Guardini and on some archival material, seeking to outline his early development and his engagement with the ideological context following World War I and in National Socialist Germany. Here Guardini’s criticisms of the modern age are presented. Besides this many other issues are addressed, such as his criticism of the women’s movement, his understanding of the youth movement, reception of Carl Schmitt, views of race, interpretation of the controversial Volk-concept, contribution to a Jewish journal in 1933, and his basic positions on the issues of obedience, order and authority. While Guardini was viewed critically by some National Socialists in the Third Reich, the administrative correspondences on him in the 1940s actually show that there was an internal debate about him among the National Socialist officials. This involved different figures, including a diplomat who came to Guardini’s defense. The internal disagreements were made more complicated because Guardini’s brothers were apparently members of the Fascist Party in Italy at this time. (shrink)

This study is the first to explicitly assess the connections between welfare state spending and the gendered and classed dimensions of unpaid care work across 29 European nations. Our research uses multi-level model analysis of European Quality of Life Survey data, examining childcare and housework burdens for people living with at least one child under the age of 18. Two key findings emerge: First, by disaggregating different types of unpaid care work, we find that childcare provision is more gendered than (...) classed—reflecting trends toward “intensive mothering”. Housework and cooking, on the contrary, demonstrate both gender and class effects, likely because they are more readily outsourced by wealthier individuals to the paid care sector. Second, while overall social expenditure has no effect on hours spent on childcare and housework, results suggest that family policy may shape the relationship between gender, income, and housework. Specifically, family policy expenditure is associated with a considerably smaller gender gap vis-à-vis the time dedicated to housework: This effect is present across the income spectrum, but is particularly substantial in the case of lower income women. (shrink)

Romano Guardini was one of the most important intellectuals of German Catholicism in the twentieth century. He influenced nearly an entire generation of German Catholic theologians and was the leading figure of the German Catholic youth movement as it grew exponentially in the 1920s. Yet there are many open questions about his early intellectual development and his academic contribution to religious, cultural, social and political questions in the Weimar Republic and in National Socialist Germany. This article draws (...) upon Guardini’s publications, the secondary literature on Guardini and on some archival material, seeking to outline his early development and his engagement with the ideological context following World War I and in National Socialist Germany. Here Guardini’s criticisms of the modern age are presented. Besides this many other issues are addressed, such as his criticism of the women’s movement, his understanding of the youth movement, reception of Carl Schmitt, views of race, interpretation of the controversial Volk-concept, contribution to a Jewish journal in 1933, and his basic positions on the issues of obedience, order and authority. While Guardini was viewed critically by some National Socialists in the Third Reich, the administrative correspondences on him in the 1940s actually show that there was an internal debate about him among the National Socialist officials. This involved different figures, including a diplomat who came to Guardini’s defense. The internal disagreements were made more complicated because Guardini’s brothers were apparently members of the Fascist Party in Italy at this time. (shrink)

This book is an important contribution to the theory of democracy and socialism. The underlying question it poses is: how, if at all, can one have both socialism and democracy? In posing an answer to this question, Professor Cunningham addresses the following topics: the definition of democracy and whether socialism is necessary to its progress: the socialist retrieval of liberal democracy associated with the work of C. B. Macpherson: the political consciousness that Gramsci placed at the center of socialist politics: (...) and attempts by those in women's and national liberation movements to go beyond 'class reductionism' in socialist theory and practice. Unlike other works on this topic, the book devotes much attention to defining key terms and drawing politically relevant conclusions. It will therefore be fully accessible to undergraduates as well as graduates and teachers of philosophy and political science. (shrink)

May Day was the most popular holiday of the two major wings of the German labor movement, Social Democratic and Communist, during the Weimar Republic (1918-1933). While the political importance and ideological significance of May Day celebrations for the German labor movement have been extensively researched, its geographicity, the inherently spatialized and spatializing moment of lived experience, as well as the content of that geographicity have been relatively neglected. Examining working-class May Day celebrations in a specific built (...) environment like the Lustgarten permits detailed consideration of the ways that the festive has involved spatializing and spatialized moments of lived experience which were part of the spatial reproduction of class relations and class experiences at the local level in Berlin in the Weimar Republic. (shrink)

This article discusses some current research claims on gender and state socialism in Eastern Europe from 1945 to 1989. It raises questions about claims by Revisionist Feminist Scholars that official state socialist women’s organizations were ‘agents’ on behalf of women, or women’s movements, perhaps feminist, and not ‘transmission belts’ of communist parties. State socialist policies are described as ‘friendly towards women’ and ‘pro-women’. In contrast, the author claims that these organizations both were and were not agents on behalf (...) of women, and also prevented women’s agency. Meaningful women’s agency is not actually shown to occur intermittently throughout their history, but in two contexts – before 1955 or in moments of political rupture. Scholars do not distinguish the who, when, and what – Who could be agents? When could they be agents? And what kind of agents could they be? State policies, the author claims, were also at one and the same time ‘friendly’ and ‘unfriendly’ towards women, sometimes harming women. The author explores why this research is happening now, discussing research on Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the Democratic Women’s Organization of Germany, the Democratic Association of Hungarian Women, later renamed MNOT, the Romanian National Council of Women and the Yugoslav Anti-Fascist Women’s Organization. (shrink)

Based on interviews with a random sample of white women who are in a second marriage, this article examines changes in women's marital power across marriage, divorce, and remarriage. In some marriages, women's market work is not considered a resource and hence does not have a positive effect on marital power, particularly when husbands are employed in low-status occupations. Conversely, women who are domestically oriented do not necessarily suffer a loss of power. Hochschild's concept of “economy of gratitude” illuminates (...) the way that marital power is affected by the meanings couples assign to women's paid and unpaid labor. Furthermore, women's previous market work and marital and divorce experiences affect the meaning of their paid and unpaid labor upon remarriage, as well as their desire for each. (shrink)

The sharp separation of Eastern, and particularly Soviet and GDR, scholarship from the West is in part owing to ideological self-isolation, and part due to lack of interest or unwillingness to accept this scholarship in the West - The institutional framework within which historical studies take place in the GDR has placed severe limits on diversity within the historical profession. The official theoretical basis of historiography is represented by dialectical materialism, as a theory of reality, and historical materialism, as the (...) conception of historical development intertwined with it. The political historian is subject to much closer direction than in social or cultural history, while social history deals primarily with local or regional history, and has begun conducting empirical case studies. Interestingly, biographies have acquired a new significance as historical works in both the GDR and the Federal Republic. In dealing with the German past, there is a conscious attempt in the GDR, as there has been recently in the Federal Republic, to overcome the fixation on 1933 and to reestablish a sense of pride in the past. There has been a greater openness and commitment to understanding historical phenomena with the reevaluation of the course of German history. (shrink)

For 170 years, Harriet Taylor Mill has been presented as a footnote in John Stuart Mill’s life. This volume gives her a separate voice. Readers may assess for themselves the importance and influence of her ideas on "women’s" issues such as marriage and divorce, education, domestic violence, and suffrage. And they will note the overlap of her ideas on ethics, religion, arts, and socialism, written in the 1830s, with her more famous husband’s works, published 25 years later.

Although democratic theorists often employ musical metaphors to describe their politics, musical practices are seldom analyzed as forms of political communication. In this article, I explore how the music of social movements, what is called “movement music,” supplements deliberative democrats' concept of public discourse as rational argument. Invoking energies, motions, and voices beyond established identities and institutions anticipates a different, more musical democracy. I argue that the “women's music” of Holly Near, founder of Redwood Records and Redwood Cultural Work, (...) exemplifies this transformative power of musical sound. (shrink)

Although democratic theorists often employ musical metaphors to describe their politics, musical practices are seldom analyzed as forms of political communication. In this article, I explore how the music of social movements, what is called "movement music," supplements deliberative democrats' concept of public discourse as rational argument. Invoking energies, motions, and voices beyond established identities and institutions anticipates a different, more musical democracy. I argue that the "women's music" of Holly Near, founder of Redwood Records and Redwood Cultural Work, (...) exemplifies this transformative power of musical sound. (shrink)

Although democratic theorists often employ musical metaphors to describe their politics, musical practices are seldom analyzed as forms of political communication. In this article, I explore how the music of social movements, what is called “movement music,” supplements deliberative democrats' concept of public discourse as rational argument. Invoking energies, motions, and voices beyond established identities and institutions anticipates a different, more musical democracy. I argue that the “women's music” of Holly Near, founder of Redwood Records and Redwood Cultural Work, (...) exemplifies this transformative power of musical sound. (shrink)

Ackelsberg investigates women’s activist participation in the National Congress of Neighborhood Women, a Brooklyn association established in 1974–75, which she treats as a model of democratic civic engagement that incorporated differences while avoiding the exclusions of the past. The NCNW assisted poor and working class women in organizing to better meet their needs and those of their communities. It arose in response to the ways women were either ignored or belittled when they attempted to engage in political work (...) both in their communities and beyond. In working with each other, the women found that they needed to address issues of diversity. The programs they created to help build bridges across differences that helped facilitate their successful activism while, simultaneously, broadening their understanding of what constitutes “politics.”. (shrink)

"What is it to claim that misogyny might be ironic? Why is it that, in the works of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer, the possibility of irony constantly interferes with a conclusive ethical judgment over the meaning of their misogyny? How do we hold our interpretations of such ambiguous texts ethically accountable? This book brings together the driving concerns of hermeneutics, feminist philosophy and the history of philosophy in dealing with the problem of irony. It develops a thematic account of the (...) concept of irony as a philosophical form of interpretation, and explores this through close readings of three key sites of controversy regarding the relationship between irony and misogyny: Schopenhauer's On Women, Kierkegaard's In Vino Veritas and Nietzsche's Woman and Child. Rather than aiming to rescue their misogynistic texts by appealing to irony, the book suggests that ironic ambiguity is a formative, rather than distractive, aspect of these texts' misogyny. Working from the productive intersection between hermeneutics and deconstruction, the book explores the substantial ways in which authority and value are constructed in terms of ironic possibility"--Publisher. (shrink)

: Although democratic theorists often employ musical metaphors to describe their politics, musical practices are seldom analyzed as forms of political communication. In this article, I explore how the music of social movements, what is called "movement music," supplements deliberative democrats' concept of public discourse as rational argument. Invoking energies, motions, and voices beyond established identities and institutions anticipates a different, more musical democracy. I argue that the "women's music" of Holly Near, founder of Redwood Records and Redwood Cultural (...) Work, exemplifies this transformative power of musical sound. (shrink)

In 2012–13, we signed up for Facebook in seven Middle East and North Africa countries and used Facebook advertisements to encourage young people to participate in our survey. Nearly 18,000 individuals responded. Some of the questions in our survey dealing with attitudes about women’s work and cosmetics were adopted from a survey conducted by the Frankfurt School in 1929 in Germany. The German survey had shown that a great number of men, irrespective of their political affiliation harbored highly (...) authoritarian attitudes toward women and that one sign of authoritarianism was men’s attitude toward cosmetics and women’s employment. We wanted to know if the same was true of the contemporary MENA. Our results suggest that lipstick and makeups as well as women’s employment are not just vehicles for sexual objectification of women. In much of MENA world a married woman’s desire to work outside the house, and her pursuit of the accoutrement of beauty and sexual attractiveness, are forms of gender politics, of women’s empowerment, but also of antiauthoritarianism and liberal politics. Our results also suggest that piety among Muslims per se is not an indicator of authoritarianism and that there is a marked gender difference in authoritarianism. Women, it seems, are living a different Islam than men. (shrink)

This article examines the term “Radical Enlightenment” as a historiographical category through the lens of the philosophical work of Dorothea Christiane Erxleben (1715–1762), a keen advocate for women’s education and the first female medical doctor in Germany. The aim of the article is to develop a methodological framework that makes it possible to critically assess the radicalism of Erxleben’s philosophical position as it is presented in her highly systematic work Rigorous Investigation (1742). In the first part of the article, (...) the term “Radical Enlightenment” is briefly discussed in the German context. The second part is dedicated to articulating two methodological problems concerning the use of the term “radical” with regards to early feminist writings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The aim of this section is to develop a new approach to the classification of radical thinkers of this period. In the remaining three parts, this methodological approach is applied to the analysis of Erxleben’s views on equality and education, focusing on her call for women’s active participation in society. Finally, it is concluded that there is sufficient evidence to categorize vital parts of Erxleben’s philosophy as radical. (shrink)

The first book length study of property-owning democracy, Republic of Equals argues that a society in which capital is universally accessible to all citizens is uniquely placed to meet the demands of justice. Arguing from a basis in liberal-republican principles, this expanded conception of the economic structure of society contextualizes the market to make its transactions fair. The author shows that a property-owning democracy structures economic incentives such that the domination of one agent by another in the market is structurally (...) impossible. The result is a renovated form of capitalism in which the free market is no longer a threat to social democratic values, but is potentially convergent with them. It is argued that a property-owning democracy has advantages that give it priority over rival forms of social organization such as welfare state capitalism and market socialist institutions. The book also addresses the currently high levels of inequality in the societies of the developed West to suggest a range of policies that target the "New Inequality" of our times. For this reason, the work engages not only with political philosophers such as John Rawls, Philip Pettit and John Tomasi, but also with the work of economists and historians such as Anthony B. Atkinson, François Bourguignon, Jacob S. Hacker, Lane Kenworthy, and Thomas Piketty. (shrink)

For women in the former GDR, daily life has changed since the unification of the two German states. With the example of diary excerpts from the autumn of 1990, written by two women, both at that time in their early 50s and having worked full time all their lives, the question is explored how women from different social backgrounds experience the changes that have affected their daily lives, how they assess their past, approach their new living conditions, cope with (...) the demands made of them and, with the aid of examples of the symbolic division of the sexes, interpret their - changed - roles in the new social arena. (shrink)

The following interview is with a retired eastern German professor whose career constitutes a case history in the comparative politics of “academic unfreedom”. Professor Erhard Naake was the only Ph.D. student in the history of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) to write his dissertation on Friedrich Nietzsche, whose work was considered “anti-socialist” throughout the history of the GDR regime. Because Herr Naake had the temerity to select Nietzsche as his thesis topic – a philosopher whose work was (...) banned from GDR bookstores and never taught in GDR schools or even universities – he never received an appointment as a professor in a GDR university. Ironically, however, even after the collapse of the GDR in 1989–1990, Herr Naake was penalized by the new powers-that-be in reunited Germany. He once again suffered a violation of his academic freedom when the university evaluation boards, which were composed of western German scholars, refused to let him keep his recently acquired position as a professor and instead summarily fired him, thus leading to his enforced retirement. As we shall see, the dramatic life story of Herr Naake reflects not only complicated issues of academic freedom and communist versus capitalist political values, but also the rich and complex history of eastern Germany both under the Nazis and GDR Communists and within reunited Germany since 1990. (shrink)

The first book-length study of property-owning democracy, Republic of Equals, argues that a society in which capital is universally accessible to all citizens is uniquely placed to meet the demands of justice. Arguing from a basis in liberal-republican principles, this expanded conception of the economic structure of society contextualizes the market to make its transactions fair. It shows that a property-owning democracy structures economic incentives such that the domination of one agent by another in the market is structurally impossible. The (...) result is a renovated form of capitalism in which the free market is no longer a threat to social democratic values but is potentially convergent with them. It is argued that a property-owning democracy has advantages that give it priority over rival forms of social organization such as welfare-state capitalism and market socialist institutions. The book also addresses the currently high levels of inequality in the societies of the developed West to suggest a range of policies that target the “New Inequality” of the twenty-first century. For this reason, the work engages not only with political philosophers such as John Rawls, Philip Pettit, and John Tomasi but also with the work of economists and historians such as Anthony B. Atkinson, François Bourguignon, Jacob S. Hacker, Lane Kenworthy, and Thomas Piketty. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.4 (2002) 697-716 [Access article in PDF] "La Mère Humanité":Femininity in the Romantic Socialism of Pierre Leroux and the Abbé A.-L. Constant Naomi J. Andrews Humanity, my mother, since you have led me, by so many paths, to conceive this design, support me, inspire me, affirm me. —Pierre Leroux, "Invocation to my Muse." 1It was during the July Monarchy in France, in the (...) era immediately preceding the Revolution of 1848, that the ideology we call socialism became more than an abstraction held by isolated intellectuals and conspirators. 2 A series of individuals, loose-knit associations, and more formal écoles were active during the 1830s and 1840s, developing a varied agenda of social reform, economic cooperation, or association, mystical Christianity, and women's liberation. Roughly lumped under the pejorative rubric of utopian socialism, and perhaps more accurately called romantic socialism, this movement was ultimately unsuccessful in achieving its diverse goals, but contributed significantly to the political discourse of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 3Socialism at this stage of its development overlapped in many ways with republicanism, both being, to quote one historian of the latter, "an amalgam of responses to the Enlightenment, the 1789 Revoluation and above all economic [End Page 697] change." 4 Many early socialists were also republicans, and socialist ideas influenced the ideology articulated by republicans such as Alexandre Ledru-Rollin and Auguste Blanqui. Louis Blanc, perhaps the best-known socialist of the decade surrounding the 1848 revolution, was and is known as a Jacobin socialist. 5From a certain perspective republicanism and socialism shared common origins and assumptions during the July Monarchy. Most socialists had come out of the political milieu of republicanism, whether through the carbonarist movement, opposition political clubs such as Droits de l'Homme and Les Amis du Peuple, or through the influential journalism trade of the Bourbon Restoration and early July Monarchy. Pierre Leroux, for one, had been a co-founder of the widely read journal le Globe, a bastion of liberalism, which he later turned over to the Saint-Simonians upon his conversion to their "church." 6 Although diverse in many ways, the left of this era did share certain core tenets, chief among them opposition to the Orleanist monarchy and, to varying degrees the belief in more democratic rule of the French nation.To say this, however, might erroneously imply a unity that was certainly not a feature of socialism during this period. In fact socialism, despite its near mystical devotion to ideas of unity, was anything but singular during its pre-Marxian phase. The spectrum of socialist thinkers and groups ranged widely. Standing closest to the republicans in their beliefs about politics and the revolutionary tradition were Jacobin socialists, most usually associated with Louis Blanc. Blanc and others articulated a social philosophy that sought "to unite two distinct ideologies: Jacobin democracy and co-operative socialism." 7 Thus Jacobin socialism combined republican political priorities and commitment to national political processes in general and to a centralized state in particular with attention to economic change, to reforming the distribution process along more equitable lines and to putting the situation of working people at the center of political change. In this goal Jacobin socialism reflected, as did other strains of socialism, the economic instability of the era and the emergence of an organized working class movement which followed the aborted revolution of 1830. 8At the other end of the spectrum one might put the Saint-Simonians and the Fourierist École Sociétaire. 9 Vehemently anti-republican, these groups shared [End Page 698] very little with the Jacobin socialists, other than a certain concern with the emerging working class, one of the few consistent features of early socialism. Unlike Jacobin socialists, these groups focused their theories of community at a very low level, having a strongly utopian component to their thinking. As a result, they tended to see national politics as irrelevant to the situation of ordinary people and even as a... (shrink)

A contribution to the renewed German and French discussion about the important German philosopher of this century, Martin Heidegger, and about his relation to national socialism. To deal with the ideological and personal partake of the thinker in the activity of NSDAP is deserves our attention from the two points of view. First, Heidegger's attitude towards his own past after 1945 is typical for the spiritual position that continually shaped the history of the Federal Republic of Germany up (...) to the 60's. Second, each tradition, which made people blind to the nazi regime, is to be critically adopted. J. Habermas asks if there was an inner connection between Heidegger's philosophy and his political perception of the situation. He summarizes the views of O. Poggeler, W. Franzen, H. Ott, and he refers to other writings and newspaper articles as well. The author emphasizes that any moral evaluation of the behaviour and the acting during the nazi epoch is possible only when based on a historical approach. Heidegger's work, on the other hand, disconnected itself from his personality already long time ago, and especially the Being and Time is placed so eminently in the philosophical thought of our century, that it cannot be discredited at all by his engagement on the part of fascism. (shrink)

Scholars have long puzzled about how to reconcile the proposal in Republic V that women should share the education and work of men, including ruling, with the deeply misogynistic comments found in the Republic and throughout Plato’s corpus. Even those who doubt that the proposal represents a sincere recognition of the women’s equality with men must provide a plausible explanation for this radical departure from the norms of Plato’s day. Taking inspiration from Annie Larivée’s application of Michèle Le Doeuff’s (...) notion of déshérence to the Republic and the Politicus, I argue that a new appreciation of the importance of childrearing motivates the reimagination of women’s work in the Republic. On this reading, the transformation of childrearing from a private undertaking of mostly women to a shared responsibility of the city as a whole protects young children from moral corruption at the hands of uneducated and morally inferior mothers and nurses. (shrink)

Unlike the man, Ernst Bloch's philosophy of hope continued to influence select East German cultural intellectuals significantly long after his departure in 1961. Bloch himself left for West Germany following the construction of the Berlin Wall. After the end of World War II, he had returned from his New York exile by invitation in 1948 to accept the chair of philosophy at the University of Leipzig. While in exile, this friend of Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno had (...) written the multivolume work entitled The Principle of Hope. In support of his return, the newly founded German Democratic Republic subsequently published it between 1954 and 1959. But Bloch's open-ended, dynamic... (shrink)

The structure of traditional fiction is essentially linear or serial. No matter how complex a given work may be, it presents information to its reader successively, one element at a time, in a sequence determined by its author. By contrast, interactive fiction is parallel in structure or, more accurately, dendritic or tree-shaped. Not one, but several possible courses of action are open to the reader. Further, which one actually happens depends largely, though not exclusively, upon the reader’s own choices. To (...) be sure, the author is still in overall control, since it is she who has set up the particular nexus of events, but the route up the narrative tree, the actual sequence of events, is generally affected, if not completely determined, by the reader’s responses to that particular reader’s specific situation. In an adventure, the sequence of action frequently depends upon the reader’s decision to go in one geographical direction rather than another. In the eliza sample, the content of the “story” depends on such particulars as whether this reader has a brother or not, whether she fears her father, and why she has consulted the terminal. In general, the text presented to the eliza-reader depends on what that reader has already said and how the computer has interpreted and stored it, and this is generally true of interactive fiction.Further, interactive fiction is, in principle , open-ended—infinite. A conversation with eliza could go on for as long as one with Woody Allen’s psychoanalyst—in principle, forever. It has no necessary terminus. The program will go one writing texts and answers on the screen as long as the reader or player chooses to supply responses. Further, the computer can act as a metafictional narrator like John Barth or Thomas Pynchon who can create a story within a story or a story that generates another story within itself which generates another story within itself and so on, fictions dizzying and dazzling. One senses one’s essential humanity wobbling in the midst of the infinite paradoxes of existence and meaning. Anthony J. Niesz, assistant professor of German at Yale University, is the author of Dramaturgy in German Drama: From Gryphius to Goethe . He is interested in the phenomenon of the meta-theater, especially in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German drama, as well as in the literature and cultural policies of the German Democratic Republic. Norman N. Holland is Milbauer Eminent Scholar at the University of Florida. He is the author of Laughing and The I. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.3 (2001) 453-454 [Access article in PDF] Gregory Fried. Heidegger's Polemos: From Being to Politics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Pp. xvi + 302. Cloth, $35.00. That an outstanding philosopher could align himself with a monstrous ideology has always been a scandalous puzzle: but since Farias's Heidegger and Nazism (1989), it is impossible to dismiss Heidegger's "political episode" as the reprehensible but (...) forgivable lapse of a backwoods academic without political sense. Learning that Heidegger not only was a dedicated Nazi, but engineered a postwar cover-up of his involvement, was for many Heideggereans like entering a beloved office and finding swastikas spraypainted over everything. Consternation has hardly died down in the years since. Philosophers have struggled either to repudiate Heidegger's thought entirely or argue that the parts of it he pledged to Nazism were inconsistent with the rest. It isn't that such people deny (or not out loud) what would seem to be an obvious fact: that a bad man can be a good philosopher. They fear that something in Heidegger's thinking somehow "entails" fascism. A dilemma gets set up: either Heidegger's philosophy is contaminated by his actions, or to engage in those actions, Heidegger must have ignored his philosophy.Fried's book on polemos in Heidegger navigates between these horns: on the one hand, Fried dismisses as "absurd" any simple claim that Heidegger's work entails fascism (5), but on the other hand, he attempts to trace, throughout Heidegger's "middle period" (roughly Being and Time to the end of World War II), a notion he believes is consistent with embracing Nazism, not to argue that Heidegger's political decisions were correct or unavoidable, but that they were predictable—though fatally hubristic—responses to the European situation as Heidegger saw it. More, Fried wants to endorse Heidegger's understanding of polemos as valuable for politics today, not because it is insulated against fascism but because fascism is still a possibility we need to confront, even while we attempt to preserve Enlightenment ideals and liberal-democratic institutions in a "nihilistic" world.Heidegger bases his views about polemos ("struggle," "confrontation") on Heraclitus Fragment 53, where it is called "father and king of all." As he explores Heidegger's [End Page 453] treatment, Fried stresses that "what is of interest is not whether Heidegger's interpretations are philologically correct, but rather how these readings shed light on his own way of making sense of history and of politics" (29). And "confrontation" is the closest thing to a consistent political doctrine in Heidegger. He understands it as a respectful opposition that allows each "side" to appear in all its validity and therefore potential risk to the other "side." Confrontation is a principle of interpretation, dialogue between individuals, and interaction between nations (see 79-80). Fried insists that this idea is a crucial part of a number of central Heideggerean concepts, as well as how Heidegger viewed his own task, and Germany's, when National Socialism appeared with its promise of a new spiritual mission for the German Volk. That Heidegger's "romantic" hopes in Nazism were unfounded does not diminish the usefulness of his work on polemos, Fried thinks, because "postmodernist" thinkers, molded by Heidegger, have nothing better to offer as they "confront" the dying or dead "modern" world with dreams of a new society. Some respect for "liberal" values will still be necessary if postmodernist "deconstruction" of oppressive structures is not to leave inroads for new, opportunistic forms of fascism.Fried's is an important study, by a sympathetic but undazzled scholar of Heidegger, of a concept that may be as basic and fruitful as he claims: but his insistence on making everything in "middle Heidegger" depend on it causes him in many places to conflate separate projects and periods in Heidegger's work that were better left distinct. He is particularly unconvincing when he suggests (e.g., 59, 100, 116) that for Heidegger, human beings can "lose their Dasein" and become "unbeings" to whom "Being is... (shrink)

Cinema has long played a crucial role in the way that societies remember and represent themselves. In the last quarter century, film has been an important medium in the public debate around the memory of the Holocaust and of Hiroshima; of the Algerian war for independence and of the Spanish Civil War; of the Allende legacy in Chile, the utopian dreams of 1968, and the aborted project of the German Democratic Republic; in identity formation in Palestine and in (...) the African diaspora. Hedges discusses the role of cinema within a global perspective that spans five continents, and proposes an original typology of cultural memory. In the process, she re-evaluates the contributions of major directors and uncovers hitherto neglected yet important works. The author develops her arguments in an approachable style that will encourage readers to rethink their own memories of films and to reflect on the way that cinema contributes to collective and cultural memory. The book's innovative approach should transform the way that we think of film and its social effects. (shrink)

This article discusses the connection between Western socialist parties and technological development during the 1950s. The cases of the British Labour Party (LP), the German Social Democracy (SPD), and the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) let us to examine socialist perspectives in managing technological progress and in conceiving programmes and purposes on scientific research. This choice allows to understand two different aspects: on the one hand, the new pragmatism of socialist and social democratic parties, which was a typical trait (...) of Postwar's socialist revisionism; on the other hand, the predominance assumed by domestic affairs in socialists’ vision, instead international topics. A very specific choice concerns the article's main focus. A large historiographical dispute has started to trace about Postwar Social Democracy's revisionism. Given such historiographical debate, this article firstly explores the behaviour and politics of the LP, the SPD, and the PSI about the the so-called modernization, a process which concerned the entire Postwar Europe. It also discusses programmes or ideas circulations about the 1950s ‘technological revolution’ and the agendas settled by socialist and social democratic parties to govern such global phenomena. (shrink)

Despite some significant advances in the creation and protection of rights affecting women's health, these do not always translate into actual health benefits for women. This collection asks: 'What is an effective law and what influences law's effectiveness or ineffectiveness? What dynamics, elements, and conditions come together to limit law's capacity to achieve instrumental goals for women's health and the advancement of women's health rights?' The book presents an integrated, co-referential and sustained critical discussion of the normative and constitutive reasons (...) for law's limited effectiveness in the field of women's health. It offers comprehensive and cohesive explanatory accounts of law's limits and for the first time in the field, introduces a distinction between formal and substantive effectiveness of laws. Its approach is trans-systemic, multi-jurisdictional and comparative, with a focus on six countries in North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa and international human rights case law based on matters arising from Hungary, Portugal, Spain, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Peru and Bolivia. The book will be a valuable resource for educators, students, lawyers, rights advocates, and policy-makers working in women's health, socio-legal studies, human rights, feminist legal studies, and legal philosophy more broadly. (shrink)

Sociologists have argued that marriage today is based on individual desires, democratic contracts, and self-development. However, feminist scholars have criticized such a view of modern marriage, arguing that it obscures persistent inequality and social restrictions in marriage. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 26 highly educated Japanese women, this article argues that persistent gender inequalities shape women's decisions to postpone marriage in Japan. The article analyzes the emotional ambivalence and contradictions in women's decisions to postpone marriage. The women discussed here (...) have intentionally or unintentionally distanced themselves from marriage in general, which they view as inhibiting autonomy, marriage with a sexist man, marriage with a man who has rejected them, and marriage with a man who has less income and/or education than they do. (shrink)